Kevin Lambert – författare

In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians came to depend on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Although not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, needed by mathematicians to do their work—whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter—all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.

Faldistoire’s grandfather thinks he’s a ghost. Sylvie’s mother reads tarot and summons stormclouds to mete her witch’s justice. Behind his Dad of the Year demeanour, Sébastien’s father hides dark designs. It’s Croustine’s grandfather who makes the boy a pair of slippers from the dead family dog, but it’s his father, the cannily-named Kevin Lambert, who always seems to be nearby when tragedy strikes, and in the cemetery, under the baleful eyes of toads, small graves are dug one after the other: Chicoutimi, Quebec, is a dangerous place for children. But these young victims of rape, arbitrary violence, and senseless murder keep coming back from the dead. They return to school, explore their sexualities, keep tabs on grown-up sins—and plot their apocalyptic retribution. Surreal and darkly comic, this debut novel by Kevin Lambert, one of the most celebrated and controversial writers to come out of Quebec in recent memory, takes the adult world to task—and then takes revenge.